Shih-Hao Kang a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology

3.4 Conclusion

At first sight it looks as though all the blame for the failure of the unions to develop can be laid on the union leaders / activists. These activists have not enjoyed any official union authority or institutional resources as a reward for their participation, while they have constantly faced potential victimisation and dismissal from their own job. Nevertheless, despite their courage and commitment, they have rarely taken organising seriously and they make little effort to attract workers and to expand the membership of their unions. Participants in these newly established organisations are not passive but active (and quite well-trained), but their organisational efforts are directed upwards and outwards, supposedly to coordinate the activity of the various organisations, but in reality they do not coordinate and collaborate, they argue endlessly over abstract questions while avoiding any discussion of their real problems, and none will make concessions because they all want to be little tsars. Meanwhile, in their relations with their members, instead of trying to organise them they offer them legal services as a means of resolving their disputes on an individual basis. Many activists believe it is not even worth taking an active appeal to the workers. Many of them do not really believe that they or their organisations should take expanding their membership as their first priority. Under such a circumstance, the development of the workplace-based trade union presents a scene of ‘one depot - one union’ on the basis of a membership of a few dozen, with the chairperson / president of union and perhaps their deputy providing legal advice to individual workers.

The core of the problem in taking collective action, according to the view of active members, is of course that people are not ready to fight for themselves; the other side of it, however, is that even the active members are not ready to work together. Thus, at their monthly meetings one could easily notice that they very rarely considered constructive agendas and ideas. It is quite ironic, the skilled lecturers of RPLBZh can explain to their new members and new activists what is a trade union and what does a trade union do as the very first lesson, but they certainly failed to deliver this to their fellow activists and leaders, whether from the KSP OZhD or TO RPLBZh OZhD. The inefficient distribution of their very limited resources, as one specific condition, is another point that reveals the limited progress of their cooperation in real practice. The wide gap between their ability and their definition of trade union activity also reflects their limited resources. But they could hardly expect their members to engage in collective action when the leaders themselves were not able even to discuss, let alone to agree on, concrete questions of organisation and coordination and were not able to achieve anything for their members, except, in some cases and after several years of litigation, securing the reinstatement of members dismissed for union activity. What reason would members have to believe that there is a bigger organisation representing them?

But the failure of the activists is only one side of the picture. We have to take into account the dramatic turning point that before the 1998 strike there was relatively strong representation at several depots, although they still had the common character of ‘one depot – one union’, and at that time there were fewer internal conflicts among the TO RPLBZh leaders and activists, while the leadership and activists of the union consisted of more or less the same people with the same attitudes and methods of working as today. This suggests that the weaknesses of the union cannot be explained solely as a result of the weakness or the strategic mistakes of the leadership and the activists.

The case studies in this and the previous chapter allow us to identify a number of other factors which can explain the lack of success of the railway unions. Firstly, the professional fragmentation of the labour force – workers in the railway industry has fostered highly alienated relations among most workers; even the immediate workplace culture did not encourage the workers to form any kind of genuine collectivity. Most of their work is carried out in small groups, with a rigid skill and status hierarchy which sets workers against each other rather than encouraging them to identify their common interests. The so-called ‘locomotive brigade’ does not present itself as any genuine collective but consists of only two people, a driver and an assistant. Moreover, the drivers, who are in the most powerful position because of the scarcity of their skills which take many years to obtain, looked down on the other railway occupations, so the RPLBZh activists do not recognise the necessity of attracting other railway occupations, because they believe that less skilled workers are not aware of their own interests, and this just reflects the belief of drivers themselves. According to most of the interviewees presented earlier, the culture of the labour collective existed only in workers’ memories.

Secondly, in looking at the social life and different social environments of different professions and depots, we can also note the alienation of workers from their colleagues in their everyday lives, because workers meet only a small number of fellow workers in their working day, because of the shift system and the fragmentation of the work process, and have very little social contact with their colleagues outside work. The occasion of the ‘planerka’ at work does not play any role in inter-worker communication. Such a factor turned out to be a very surprising impression to me. Whether drivers or other professions, railway workers expressed in different ways that there were little contact outside the common identification of occupation. This factor is also a very serious barrier to workers representing themselves as general subjects, which creates very difficult conditions for any trade union organisation to establish close contact. This alienation of workers from one another and from any sense of a collective explains why workers treated the union activists as a personal consultation agency, looking for help but not perceiving a common solution.

Thirdly, the factors above are reinforced and integrated by the geographical fragmentation and the particularity of each depot, which means that activists do not come into regular contact with one another and enables activists to believe that only they know best how to deal with problems under their ‘specific conditions’ and only they are able to deal with their own administration. The particularity of remotely located and widely dispersed workplaces has made more difficulties for local primary trade union organisations to build efficient coordination. Without resources to provide support, it is difficult for them to think about coordination. Apart from the hostile competition from ROSPROFZhEL, the geographical fragmentation just strengthened the tendency to turn to individualised solutions. The leaders / activists were aware of the weakness of their organisations and of the fact that they had little idea of what to do about it, which only made them even more sensitive to any implied criticism from ‘outsiders’, so that the leader / activists even started to despise the opinions of one another. Such a factor meant that any ambitious intention to make united activity simply became an ambiguous one, and what was commonly shared was, ironically though not unimportant, not a common experience of collective struggle but the mutual understanding of personalities and their political ideas. Obviously, with very little shared experience of struggle and little interest from the members, the common effort to develop trade union activity was very ineffective. This is an important reason why not only KSP OZhD but also TO RPLBZh were badly coordinated, and both of them based on individual contacts rather than real collaboration and collective action.

Fourthly, and most importantly, we also find that repression by the administration has reinforced such fragmentation, especially after the 1998 strike. The fact that all RPLBZh organisations were provided with union offices by the administration, while only one of the non-RPLBZh free trade unions received permission to have a union office at the depot clearly shows the difference in the administration policies towards the different unions. The railway administration may have taken a cautious approach to the alternative union organisations through the 1990s, although they generally ignored them and did not give them bargaining status, which meant that they had little legitimacy as representative bodies. But following the defeat of the 1998 strike the administration knew that they could simply put the alternative unions under constant pressure, without any serious risk of having to pay the price of provoking any massive union-led rebellion. As one consequence, the activists, the potential leaders, lost any credibility that they may have had as representatives of their members’ collective strength in the face of management. Subsequently it has been very difficult for the depot-based alternative union organisations on the October Railway to maintain the level of their membership, because the administration has always pressed hard on their activities during the whole process, and many members immediately quit the new organisations under such pressure. People who do not bow to the pressure from the administration soon discover that they have to find another job. This factor is reinforced by the insecurity of the labour force and its vulnerability to management which is most acute for those in the less skilled occupations. The weakness of the unions in the face of management has been further compounded by the impact of the new Russian Labour Code, which means that management can refuse bargaining rights to any union which does not represent a majority of the entire labour force. In the face of such opposition from the administration, the alternative unions have little alternative but to seek to defend their members through legal channels on an individual basis, and it is quite understandable that the union activists should seek to create solidarity networks among themselves, through TO RPLBZh and KSP OZhD. But at the same time, the weakness of their membership and organisational base and the consequent marginalisation of the union activists explain why these higher level bodies, particularly KSP OZhD, were riven by abstract conflicts around tactics and strategy.

Although only RPLBZh had a more or less real territorial organisation which went beyond the limits of the workplace, it is still difficult to conclude that the drivers’ union had any obvious organisational advantages. Apart from the organisations at depots TCh-8, TCh-20 and TCh-21, which are more or less stable, the rest of the RPLBZh primary organisations were similar to or even weaker than the non-RPLBZh free trade unions. The fact that every union committee focuses on its own depot, and the territorial organisation has no resources to support even one full-time staff member (even the president of the territorial committee), has meant that territorial coordination involves little more than sharing the experience of court cases and the use of legal resources. The existence of a primary organisation depends essentially on the presence of a ‘leader’, an activist who has the will and the ability to carry out union work, usually in free time before and after work, or even the willingness of a sacked former employee to do this work. In such cases the trade unions are run with an individualised character determined by the activists, and more importantly, functioned to meet demands of individualist solutions for their members; that mostly involves taking cases relating to work regulation and legal protection to court. The role of ‘leaders’ then determined that the coordination of the union was essentially formal. All these factors were then reinforced by geographic conditions, so that an immediate solidarity interest for their profession did not come out clearly.

Although the situation was better before 1998, even the RPLBZh activists acknowledge that their relative success in building their capacity in the earlier times was not a reflection of their own strength, or the relative advantages of their profession. Their relative success was partly a result of the fact that they had benefited from the legacy of the wave of establishing new ‘representative’ bodies to replace the notorious old ones in the early 90s; and partly because engine drivers have their ‘train routes’ to connect these isolated depots, but their success was primarily thanks to the existence of a few well-disciplined and competent activists who were able to benefit from the fact that the administrations were not ready to fight court cases. Their relative success in winning such cases in this period meant that engine drivers could quite easily attach their hopes to the ability of their union committee or territorial committee to defend their individual disputes with the administration, even if they did not have any grounds for confidence in their ability to make a better collective agreement. This helps us to understand why train drivers remained in their union and also why some 10% of them were willing to participate in the August 1998 strike which broke out during the general wage arrears crisis. The response of the administration to the strike, however, revealed the organisational weak point of the union. As a consequence, under the sharp, intense discrimination from the railway administration, they have been continuously set aside and not allowed to participate in the negotiation of the collective agreement.

Unlike train drivers, workers with other professions on the Railway had never enjoyed good conditions and have suffered from a high degree of job insecurity, which further encouraged an individualistic orientation to survival. Workers sought for, and received, individual help from their ‘trade union boss’. The non-RPLBZh unions were doomed to follow the same way as RPLBZh. Nevertheless, they do not have the legacy from which RPLBZh still benefits; and, compared to the central role of the RPLBZh Moscow headquarters, they have no possibility to get more authority from their very isolated workplace to spread their messages to others. The one-way service indeed satisfied workers’ immediate requests, but that left little space to present an alternative image to create the illusion of better work conditions like the RPLBZh organisation had. They even have to struggle for the very survival of their organisations. Individualistic demands and their impact on these trade union activists therefore have constantly dominated the form of their trade union development. The so-called leadership was conducted in a different way. Yet, that has become the only base for the visible leadership among these organisations. On the other side, from the point of view of activists, they constantly emphasised this as a Russian philosophy of life: the activities rely on the subjectivity of workers, so there is no immediate necessity for activists and leaders to attract members’ loyalty. Logically, the progress and perspective of any coordinated organisation, KSP OZhD as the concrete example we have seen, could only be based on the individual but frail commitment of the leaders. Most leaders consequently failed to persuade ordinary workers to commit themselves to their organisation.

Especially after the 1998 strike, legal advice and the representation of individual members in court, particularly those who have been dismissed for union activity, have become the main function of the unions for their members. While it is understandable that weak trade union organisations would come to rely on such methods of struggle, such a strategy has been seen as a problematic one. In a review of his own experience as a shared, similar example, the former president of the Trade Union of the Arsenal Factory (which had more than 13,000 members in 1990) concluded thus:

‘I do feel regret because before I focused too much on the legal struggle for the trade union to challenge our employer… Success in court did not make our union stronger. Though I cannot say that I have found a better alternative either’ (Nikolai Prostov,_May 04, 2003).⁹¹

These factors were the critical ones behind the incompetence of the leadership. The lack of conditions which could unite all experienced activists to work with each other is critical under such circumstances. The weakness of the internal network of these unions, as well as the critical undermining of the continuation of the workers’ movement, was conditioned by the lack of any real share of very limited resources; little experience of success being imparted; limited intentions and no tactics for developing a strategy for their campaign. Their coordination therefore did not change their conditions but reproduces the condition of individual solutions.

Certainly, what is presented here is the story of real life and real barriers, any further judgement might be an impractical one. It has never been easy to organise a solid and well-coordinated trade union with a widely distributed workforce. The study reveals all the difficult conditions facing any union leadership, and the study of workplace social relations, union activists and union coordination activity shows that the above factors have subordinated the union pattern on the October Railway. The strong individualism and the fragmentation of the labour force weakened union activists and thus the union’s prospects. And these were the critical factors behind the incompetent leadership problem. Their practice can even be seen as ‘solidarity discouraging’. In such a sense, all the union organisations do not really perform as a genuine trade union anymore, and this challenges the claim of Gordon and Klopov (2000), hence the development has been a retreat, rather than just a stage of ‘slowing down of their development’ (ibid., p.209).

The analysis from the case study clarifies how an active trade union following its own struggle can develop into such a sad situation, by which we perceive more insight into the Russian labour movement. The fragmentation of the labour force, which makes it especially difficult to develop solidarity, has always been one of the major issues of industrial relations studies of the role of trade unions. As will be shown by the dockers’ case, and by the example of Taiwan below, fragmentation is not a sufficient condition for union weakness, because it is possible to overcome the barrier of fragmentation and individualism through effective organisation and solidarity building. Interestingly, that is the view shared by many local activists. Moiseenko, the president of RPD Port Committee of St Petersburg Seaport, said:

‘The problem of the railway workers (RPLBZh) is complicated but simple, there everyone wants to be the leader, a union can not work if there are so many heads fighting for the decision making!’ (Aleksandr Moiseenko, October 21, 2003)

The problem with the Russian railway unions is that the leaders / activists simply accept the barriers and constraints and do not try to overcome them. The concern will be how much can be improved if the union is healthier and well-coordinated? Even if all the member trade unions within the KSP OZhD, the very weak non-RPLBZh organisations as well as RPLBZh, could keep the individual loyalty of their members, and resolve this problem through a mutual, common effort, the question still remains: with their weak belief in the importance of organisational work, could they overcome the distrust of the mass of workers?

Coincidently, when I finished the case study in 2003 and went back to Taiwan, I was invited to participate in the mobilisation campaign of the Taiwanese Railway Workers’ Union. The campaign is to resist the Government’s privatisation project. The atmosphere and the rhetoric there was very different from that in the Russian context. In most mobilisation meetings, unionists would say things like ‘If you don’t come out today, tomorrow you will be responsible for the result’ (a senior union officer). And the following response of active members could be heard: ‘We are so ashamed of the inefficient mobilisation; we lost the face of “our station”’ (a local union member). In short, the energy of the Taiwanese labour movement is expressed by exploiting individual relationships in the fate of ‘we the union’. Every element within the two cases looks so different; the hardcore of the characteristics of labour relations in the two countries, however, is less different. The outcome of a labour protest campaign or any visible labour movement event should not simply be perceived as an expression of its social relations of production. In other words, the very different outcome cannot be merely a reflection of the capacity of their collective experience. Nevertheless, while the ‘making’ comes to be visible in the resistance, it, too, continuously develops a critical consciousness within the dynamic of labour relations in its society (Dudchenko and Mytil’ 1998). Therefore, with its virtual-but-anyway-rememberable collective culture and the lack of a developed individualistic network, we can clearly see the reason for the problematic transformation of the current Russian labour movement.

In the next chapter I will present the case of the dockers at St Petersburg seaport to make an interesting comparison of their union making.